VANCOUVER -- His restaurants are on the bucket list of Canadian things one must do.

In fact, Martin Picard is a Canadian icon himself and not for his squirrel sushi or beaver cookery. (More on that later.) It’s because his food is unforgettably delicious and slobberingly lusty.

He was in Vancouver recently to promote his self-published cookbook, Au Pied de Cochon Sugar Shack. It’s based on his real-life maple syrup operation with a seasonal restaurant and testing "laboratory" for recipes; it’s 45 minutes away from his flagship restaurant, Au Pied de Cochon, in Montreal.

Undeterred by his publicist who wishes reporters wouldn’t focus on the sensational, I ask about cooking squirrels and beavers.

In the cookbook, his squirrel sushi is displayed with furry arms, legs, head sticking out of the rectangular pressed sushi. The beaver dish is a riff on a traditional French rabbit dish; it’s garnished with beaver head and fur.

For Picard, this isn’t sensationalism or attention-seeking in any way. It’s what a curious, passionate, dedicated cook does. "You have to understand. I’m a cook," he says. "I love to taste things. It’s just very simple. I’m here to cook, to eat, to taste? this is my nature. I maybe impress people a certain way but I never try to provoke."

By law, squirrels and beavers must be caught by a trapper and can’t be served at his restaurants but he loves the idea that they were trapped in forests near his sugar shack (cabane sucre). "As a chef, it’s natural," he says of cooking local fauna.

Picard, you must understand, has a pedigree. He has apprenticed at the three-Michelin-star Pierre Gagnaire restaurant in Paris, where I’ve dined and imagined angels cooking in the kitchen. He’s also cooked at Le Cinq in the luxurious Georges V Hotel in Paris, and at Toque, a top-rated restaurant in Montreal. And, chefs love him. Au Pied de Cochon is Anthony Bourdain’s favourite restaurant.

"He’s created one of the western world’s few bullshit-free zones, a place where it’s all about, and only about, what’s delicious and pleasurable and true, and where too much of a good thing is never enough," Bourdain wrote in the introduction to Picard’s first cookbook, Au Pied de Cochon: The Album.

A couple of years ago, after I ate at Au Pied de Cochon ("PDC" to locals) I took to my blog: "Fat, foie gras, meat, meat, fat, fat, foie gras, tres gros portions of food," I chronicled.

It’s decadence but it’s divine, delicious decadence.

At PDC, my husband wrenched open his jaw, crocodile like, to accommodate a highrise tower of a foie gras burger glistening with meat and foie and condiments. He ordered a side of frites, cooked in duck fat. He found nirvana.

Meanwhile, a waiter cranked a can opener, freeing the PDC "duck in a can" (duck breast, foie gras, pork belly in reduced balsamic sauce), whacked the can’s bottom until the duck plopped out, right next to cauliflower puree and red cabbage, completing the dish.

It was a memorable meal which began by coming face to face with a huge tank of black slithery eels at the entrance, a special on the menu that evening.

His other restaurant, Au Pied de Cochon Sugar Shack, is open from February to May but don’t bother trying to reserve this year? they were fully booked 10 hours after reservation lines opened. "Ten thousand people reserved," he says.

Picard has taken the skills and passion of an haute chef and made his own way to rustic, country fare, the kind you want to devour.

Sometimes, he invokes the coureur de bois. In his Food Network Canada show, The Wild Chef, he hunted deer with a crossbow and cooked al fresco deer haggis, hotdogs, carpaccio and brain out in the wilds of the Eastern Townships; he fished for eels in Kamouraska, ending the expedition with onion tart with braided eels.

He self-published both of his cookbooks for good reason. "It doesn’t work. It was becoming complicated so we decided to do it our way," he says, of working with a publisher.

His cookbooks defy convention and yet, The Album sold about 45,000 copies without the marketing and distribution artillery of a publishing house.

His latest cookbook challenges your biceps (it must weigh about five pounds) and your imagination. He’s enlisted artist friends to contribute artwork and short stories (one is about a woman, a lone human survivor, eating herself to death in a maple syrup farm. It’s surrealistic.) You can understand how publishers might have balked. A photo of his naked pastry chef in a claw foot bath-tub filled with maple syrup? A titillating one of her chugging a pitcher of maple syrup with it running down her wet T-shirt? Of squirrel sushi and "Confederation" beaver? Short stories? A photo of the spoils of a Rabelaisian meal atop a painting (his artist friend’s) which looks like the detritus of an all-out food fight?

His food is what excites. The recipes, all using maple syrup, are bold, flavour-filled Quebecois and French bistro-style dishes. From sugar shack brioche to marrow bones and caviar, from patriotes cake to maple pig’s head and lobster, from hare with orange and maple syrup to foie gras tatin, from maple macarons to whole pig with omojo sauce, the book is "my love letter to maple syrup and the cultural tradition of the Quebec sugar shack." he says. "Maple syrup is an ethos of the Canadian spirit."

Asked what it is about foie gras (his foie gras poutine and other foie gras dishes are renown) and maple syrup that captivates him so, he says, "But I love everything. It’s simply my nature. I’m obsessive."

Should you be curious about squirrel and beaver but recoil at tasting it, Picard says squirrel meat is very good. "When you think about it, they eat acorns. In Spain, they feed pigs acorns to produce the best ham in the world. "With squirrel, there’s not the same amount of fat so the nutty taste isn’t too noticeable. It’s a little wild, in the way guinea hen is just a little wilder than chicken."

As for beaver, I read between the lines and plan to decline any offer of beaver as food. "It’s funny. It has a strange taste but it’s not bad. It’s a little wild (tasting). It eats trees for a diet. It’s such a unique taste," he says. "You have to be very careful not to contaminate the flavour with the two glands by its tail."

Refer to his so-called "wild" reputation, he laughs. "Non! It’s the way people see me. I have two kids and one wife. The only thing I should do more of is exercise."

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